From my personal experience, the biggest things that will help with performance will be the video card and memory. Sometimes that traps you into the pitfall of needing to upgrade your motherboard and CPU to accommodate newer hardware types (that depends on how old the motherboard is). I slowly upgrade mine every couple of years as prices come down on better pieces since there's always something new coming out that pushes down the pricing of "older" hardware.

It really depends on your current system so once we know that hopefully we can see if there's anywhere to improve. :) Also, have you tried EQ2 again lately to see how your system currently handles it? If you've updated it within the past 3-4 years you might not even have to worry.

edit: Another suggestion, we do have a forum for computer advice that Kaolian (our resident computer genius) covers, and maybe you can get some help there as well: http://eq2.zam.com/forum.html?forum=25

Just out of curiosity, where did you get that 5"mb" ram number? should that be 4GB? if not, you might have a problem there. I suppose you could add 2 2GB sticks and a 1 to an athalon motherboard and get 5GB though too. Really just wondering if the mb was a typo or if your computer is only reporting that much available.

Your CPU will do so the first thing you should be worried about is the ram. 2GB is barely enough to run Win7 and when you open power hungry applications like EQ2 you are leaving yourself resource-less! The only option your computer has is to create a huge temporary swap file and then swap data out between ram and the file. This results in very slow game play whenever anything stored in ram needs to change. (little things things like a zone change will seem to take forever!)

You also didn't give us a vid card spec and that corner of the "holy trinity" is critical to visually intense game like EQ2.

In order to successfully run EQ2, (ie: at a decent frame rate, with a reasonable level of detail and without glitches or hitching) your vid card should be recent issue (no more than a couple years old) and should have at least 500MB of onboard dedicated vid-ram. A vid card built into your mother board is the worst of all possible situations since it will usually use "shared ram" drawing power from your (already stressed) main board ram.

bottom line is double your ram and check your vid card (replacing if needed) and you should be able to play. Best of luck...

Edited, Aug 3rd 2011 10:40am by OldBlueDragon

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"Well, my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle." ~ Mal Reynolds

Just out of curiosity, where did you get that 5"mb" ram number? should that be 4GB? if not, you might have a problem there. I suppose you could add 2 2GB sticks and a 1 to an athalon motherboard and get 5GB though too. Really just wondering if the mb was a typo or if your computer is only reporting that much available.

2 sticks of 2 gig, one stick of one. Five. My board has 4 slots, one is empty.

Your CPU will do so the first thing you should be worried about is the ram. 2GB is barely enough to run Win7 and when you open power hungry applications like EQ2 you are leaving yourself resource-less! The only option your computer has is to create a huge temporary swap file and then swap data out between ram and the file. This results in very slow game play whenever anything stored in ram needs to change. (little things things like a zone change will seem to take forever!)

You also didn't give us a vid card spec and that corner of the "holy trinity" is critical to visually intense game like EQ2.

In order to successfully run EQ2, (ie: at a decent frame rate, with a reasonable level of detail and without glitches or hitching) your vid card should be recent issue (no more than a couple years old) and should have at least 500MB of onboard dedicated vid-ram. A vid card built into your mother board is the worst of all possible situations since it will usually use "shared ram" drawing power from your (already stressed) main board ram.

bottom line is double your ram and check your vid card (replacing if needed) and you should be able to play. Best of luck...

Edited, Aug 3rd 2011 10:40am by OldBlueDragon

I'm running Windows 7 and EQII with only 2 GB too, it's not that bad, although I do notice that I'm not able to run much besides that. I used to be able to run media player and my browser too.

So the 2 gig of ram shouldn't be too hard on the game, if you turn some options off anyway (I've got the game fairly high up myself, it works but at times I do shut off some options), but I have no idea what the processor's influence will be.